


I Want to Break Free

by hopeless_eccentric



Series: (Free! That's right! Free!) Penumbra Commissions [40]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Color Blind Nureyev Rights, Escape Rooms, Friendship, Humor, Multi, Team Bonding, Vaguely crack, all relationships are pretty background this is mostly teamwork, failure at BOTH of the aforementioned, mostly just an escape room going really bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 20:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29302167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: If Juno had to guess, a crew of six who made their livelihoods escaping was not the target audience for an escape room, let alone one themed around the concept of a bank heist.AKA the crew does an escape room feat. team building, self discovery, and potentially a minor concussion
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko/Vespa Ilkay, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Rita & Juno Steel, Vespa Ilkay & Juno Steel
Series: (Free! That's right! Free!) Penumbra Commissions [40]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1921492
Comments: 22
Kudos: 101





	I Want to Break Free

**Author's Note:**

> hey all!! finally done with this latest round of commissions!
> 
> Content warnings for minor head trauma (someone falls and gets minorly bonked)

If Juno had to guess, a crew of six who made their livelihoods escaping was not the target audience for an escape room, let alone one themed around the concept of a bank heist.

The room was a campy recreation of a bank vault, plastered with a money patterned wallpaper that seemed to be somehow making Vespa more upset than the concept of getting stuck in the same room as Nureyev for an hour. The remainder of the decor wasn’t much better, with plastic bars of gold strewn about the floor and various tables, as if to give the impression that such things as furniture, sites for codes, and papers with hokey riddles on the back of them were at all at home in a place such as the high security vault that the room attempted to emulate.

Buddy, of course, had taken to a certain amount of leadership immediately, delegating different crew members to different clues. However, after half an hour or so of overthinking, time and patience were beginning to run out.

“Juno, love,” Nureyev called from the piece of paper to which he’d been assigned. “Apparently, the lock to the safe containing a hint for Rita’s puzzle has something to do with a certain Martian criminal. Do you think you could spare a moment to look over it for me?”

Juno didn’t have to be a detective to know Nureyev just wanted an excuse to look away from the closest thing to a final exam he’d likely ever gone through, but, being glad for any change of pace, was all too happy to trade the various sheets of plastic he was supposed to be stacking to find some kind of number code for a question off of his HCPD academy exam.

He leaned back in his chair in thought, if just to have something to rock with his feet.

“Watch yourself, Steel,” Vespa warned from the puzzle box she’d been boring holes into for the last twenty minutes. “If you crack your head open on a goddamn team building exercise, I dunno if I’m gonna wanna fix it.”

“Vespa,” Buddy warned, though the chuckle was inseparable from her voice.

“Fine,” Vespa huffed, “I’ll fix it, but that means you’re gonna have to get stuck with me for a hell of a lot longer than either of us want.”

“Gross,” Juno snorted, leaning back in his chair again to squint at the paper. “Ransom, what does this say? I can’t ever read your goddamn handwriting.”

Nureyev swallowed, composing himself.

“Dear, do you remember when you said I wouldn’t need my glasses for this?”

“You could’ve solved the code on your comms,” Juno snorted.

“You’re right. I could have. However, I didn’t, and here we are.”

“Hey, I—”

“I’ve got it, Mistah Steel,” Rita brushed Juno off, tearing the paper from his hands and passing him whatever circular device she had been messing with throughout the last several minutes. “What is the crime of Borus “Chorus” Levinsky?”

Juno groaned.

“What’s wrong Mistah Steel? I used to have his in-depth stream miniseries special on at the office all the time.”

“That’s the problem,” he sighed. “They want you to pick one crime?”

“I believe they only give you two chances to get it correct,” Nureyev winced, turning to check the keypad upon the wall again.

“I thought he was best known as a thief,” Buddy offered, brows knit.

“Here’s the thing,” Juno huffed. “They got him on tax fraud and gave him the maximum sentence. They couldn’t ever place him at the scene of the crime for anything because he had so many goddamn aliases. The HCPD only ever figured out fifteen of them, but there are about twenty other ones we think might be him too. Hasn’t ever been proven, but it’s kind of common knowledge.”

“Like aliens being real and all that,” Rita snorted.

“Rita—” Juno started to warn.

“You met an alien, Mistah Steel,” Rita huffed. “I don’t see why you’re trying so hard to pretend aliens ain’t a thing when a big scary squid lady blew up your eyeball.”

“She does have a point,” Nureyev murmured absentmindedly, squinting at the various colors of plastic as he shuffled them once more.

“Can we get back to the whole thirty five aliases thing?” Vespa sputtered from the other side of the room. “What kind of asshole needs that many aliases when you could just, I dunno, actually be good at your job instead?”

“We worked together on only one occasion,” Jet mused. “I found him to be a deeply unpleasant man.”

Nureyev cleared his throat.

“Perhaps we ought to get back to the question at hand.”

“So—” Juno sighed, leaning back in the chair once more and ignoring its protesting creak. “Theft or tax fraud? Ransom, how many squares are there on the keypad answer?”

“No squares,” Nureyev returned with an upwards glance.

“Dammit,” Juno groaned in time with the chair.

“Steel—” Vespa hissed.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll split my head open, nothing I haven’t heard a thousand times before in high school,” he huffed.

“That explains a lot more than I expected,” Vespa snorted.

“You guys,” Rita finally sighed after the room had gone furiously quiet for far too long, interrupted only by various noises of frustration, occasional trade-offs of clues, and thinly veiled cries for help in the form of at least three furiously bouncing legs under any number of any tables at any given time, “if you really just wanna get outta here and do a stream night or something instead, I can just, y’know, hack the locks.”

“As tempting as the option sounds, I brought us all here as a test of our ability to work as a team,” Buddy began slowly. “While I see a certain level of error in our use of this particular room as a test margin, I do not see any reason to exit the game early unless any member of the team is under some particular distress.”

“Anyone feeling distressed?” Juno called out, giving a glance around the room with a smile that failed when he caught Nureyev’s gaze and found it a little too wide for his liking. “Ransom?”

“Love,” he began slowly. “I’ve found the beginning of a code in the pieces of plastic you’ve handed me.”

“And?”

“I’m beginning to suspect—” Nureyev broke himself off to shake his head. “Dear, may I ask you a question?”

“Just spit it out, Ransom, we don’t have all day,” Vespa huffed.

“Why would they make two out of three sheets of plastic the same color if you’re meant to overlap them?”

Juno leaned backwards over his chair to squint at the pages, which, as far as he could tell, were three distinct primary shades. Nureyev, on the other hand, was displaying the polar opposite of all three shades when it came to the utter loss of color in his face.

“You are holding three different colors,” Jet replied before Juno had the chance to break his neck from bending backwards over the chair.

“Dear Lord, I think I’m colorblind,” Nureyev swallowed.

His realization didn’t have long to hang in the air, however, for his sentence was punctuated by a heavy thump and subsequent groan as Juno’s chair decided to forfeit the team building exercise and his head decided to become better teammates with the floor.

“Dear!”

“I’m good,” Juno grimaced, still breathless by the time Vespa had finished dancing around the various props of the room to pry his head off the ground and start checking for damage.

“Dammit, Steel,” Vespa hissed.

“I get that a lot.”

“Ransom, back up,” she added. “I need some light. You can hold his hand like he’s on his goddamn deathbed once I’m done seeing how many more brain cells he’s killed.”

“Duly noted,” Nureyev murmured, merely stepping around Juno so his shadow would be cast in a different direction.

“I’m fine, I swear,” Juno grunted upon sitting up.

As much as he was being honest, save for the room still spinning with the shock of the fall, he couldn’t particularly complain when Rita held her comms up in a silent gesture, to which Buddy replied with a solemn nod.

Maybe the exercise hadn’t gone as ideally planned, especially not with the crew breaking out of an escape room in their own, somewhat unconventional way, but between Vespa shining her pocket flashlight into both of his eyes, Nureyev doing his best to keep him on his feet, and the rest of the crew doing their damndest to hack the lock, Juno had to admit they’d probably figured out some level of teamwork. He’d always tended to work better with the people he’d been through some level of misery with anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> yeehaw
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading!! make sure to SMASH that kudos button and leave a comment down below (and don't forget to stay awesome gamerz)
> 
> Check me out on tumblr @hopeless-eccentric or on twitter @withane22 , both places where im still taking free commissions for about the next twenty four hours if you're interested!


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